1776

by David McCullough

It was Parliament as theater, and gripping, even if the outcome, like much of theater, was understood all along. For importantly it was also well understood, and deeply felt, that the historic chamber was again the setting for history, that issues of the utmost consequence, truly the fate of nations, were at stake.

The commander in chief of the army, George Washington, was himself only forty-three. John Hancock, the President of the Continental Congress, was thirty-nine, John Adams, forty, Thomas Jefferson, thirty-two, younger even than the young Rhode Island general.

“The first of all qualities [of a general] is courage,” he read in the Memoirs Concerning the Art of War by Marshal Maurice de Saxe, one of the outstanding commanders of the era. “Without this the others are of little value, since they cannot be used. The second is intelligence, which must be strong and fertile in expedients. The third is health.”

AT THE START of the siege there had been no American army. Even now it had no flag or uniforms. Though in some official documents it had been referred to as the Continental Army, there was no clear agreement on what it should be called in actual practice. At first it was referred to as the New England army, or the army at Boston. The Continental Congress had appointed George Washington to lead “the army of the United Colonies,” but in correspondence with the general, the President of Congress, John Hancock, referred to it only as “the troops under your command.” Washington, in his formal orders, called them the “Troops of the United Provinces of North America.” Privately he described them as the “raw materials” for an army. To the British and those Loyalists who had taken refuge in Boston, they were simply “the rebels,” or “the country people,” undeserving the words “American” or “army.” General John Burgoyne disdainfully dubbed them “a preposterous parade,” a “rabble in arms.”

Neither side had yet moved to fortify the even higher ground of the Dorchester peninsula overlooking the harbor. With its numerous green hills falling away to blue water, it was a particularly beautiful part of the world and especially in summer. Washington thought it “very delightful country,” and more the pity that it should be a theater of war.

Not the least of Washington’s problems was that he had command of a siege, yet within his entire army there was not one trained engineer to design and oversee the building of defenses. Still, he ordered larger and stronger defenses built, and the work went forward. “Thousands are at work every day,” wrote the Reverend William Emerson of Concord after touring the lines. “ ’Tis surprising the work that has been done. . . . ’Tis incredible.” It had been the Reverend Emerson who declared the morning of April 19, as British regiments advanced on Concord, “Let us stand our ground. If we die, let us die here!”

A British ship’s surgeon who used the privileges of his profession to visit some of the rebel camps, described roads crowded with carts and wagons hauling mostly provisions, but also, he noted, inordinate quantities of rum—“for without New England rum, a New England army could not be kept together.” The rebels, he calculated, were consuming a bottle a day per man.

Washington himself chose to wear a light blue ribbon across his chest, between coat and waistcoat. But then there was never any mistaking the impeccably uniformed, commanding figure of Washington, who looked always as if on parade.

It was an army of men accustomed to hard work, hard work being the common lot.

Rare was the man who had never seen someone die.

In truth, the situation was worse than they realized, and no one perceived this as clearly as Washington. Seeing things as they were, and not as he would wish them to be, was one of his salient strengths.

“Be easy . . . but not too familiar,” he advised his officers, “lest you subject yourself to a want of that respect, which is necessary to support a proper command.”

On one occasion, surveying the work on defenses by horseback, Putnam paused to ask a soldier to throw a large rock in the path up onto the parapet. “Sir, I am a corporal,” the soldier protested. “Oh, I ask your pardon, sir,” said the general, who dismounted and threw the rock himself, to the delight of all present.

“This appointment,” wrote Adams, “will have great effect in cementing and securing the union of these colonies,” and he prophesied that Washington could become “one of the most important characters in the world.”

Washington’s effect on the troops and young officers was striking. “Joy was visible on every countenance,” according to Nathanael Greene, “and it seemed as if the spirit of conquest breathed through the whole army.”

The Journal of Major George Washington, made his daring and resourcefulness known throughout the colonies and in Europe.

But of all the theatrical productions he had seen it was Cato, by the English author Joseph Addison, the most popular play of the time, that Washington loved best. One line in particular he was to think of or quote frequently in his role now as commander-in-chief: “’Tis not in mortals to command success, but we’ll do more, Sempronius, we’ll deserve it.”

In a popular English novel of the day, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, Tobias Smollett wrote that to be a country gentleman one was “obliged to keep horses, hounds, carriages, with suitable numbers of servants, and maintain an elegant table for the entertainment of his neighbors.” It could have been a description of life at Mount Vernon, with the difference that the servants were black slaves.

It was also a matter of record that Washington had been retired from military life for fifteen years, during which he had not even drilled a militia company. His only prior experience had been in backwoods warfare—a very different kind of warfare—and most notably in the Braddock campaign of 1755, which had been a disaster. He was by no means an experienced commander. He had never led an army in battle, never before commanded anything larger than a regiment. And never had he directed a siege.

To his wife Martha he wrote that “far from seeking this appointment, I have used every endeavor in my power to avoid it, not only from my unwillingness to part with you and the family, but from a consciousness of its being a trust too great for my capacity. . . . it has been a kind of destiny that has thrown me upon this service. . . .”

Washington considered him “the first officer in military knowledge and experience we have in the whole army,” and it was at Washington’s specific request that Congress had made Lee second-in-command.

Washington had assigned Lee to command the left wing of the army, Putnam, the center, while Ward was responsible for the right wing, which included Dorchester.

Of these New Englanders, all citizen-soldiers, Washington quickly surmised that Thomas, Sullivan, and Greene were the best he had.

Thomas had talked of resigning, until Washington sent an urgent plea in which, paraphrasing a line from his favorite play Cato, he said that in such a cause as they were engaged, “surely every post ought to be deemed honorable in which a man can serve his country.”

Never was a cause more important or glorious than that which you are engaged in; not only your wives, your children, and distant posterity, but humanity at large, the world of mankind, are interested in it; for if tyranny should prevail in this great country, we may expect liberty will expire throughout the world.

America must raise an empire of permanent duration, supported upon the grand pillars of Truth, Freedom, and Religion, encouraged by the smiles of Justice and defended by her own patriotic sons.

In a letter by Nathanael Green

If the desperate American need for leaders had thrust young men like Nathanael Greene into positions beyond their experience, the British military system, wherein commissions were bought and aristocrats given preference, denied many men of ability roles they should have played.

Knox’s “noble train” had arrived intact. Not a gun had been lost. Hundreds of men had taken part and their labors and resilience had been exceptional. But it was the daring and determination of Knox himself that had counted above all. The twenty-five-year-old Boston bookseller had proven himself a leader of remarkable ability, a man not only of enterprising ideas, but with the staying power to carry them out. Immediately, Washington put him in command of the artillery.

In a letter to a Virginia friend, Washington wrote almost lightly of preparing to “bring on a rumpus” with the redcoats.

Just as he had shown no signs of despair when prospects looked bleak, he now showed no elation in what he wrote or in his outward manner or comments.

Responding to such tributes, Washington was duly modest and gracious, and in truth they meant more than he showed. He was happy to “hear from different quarters that my reputation stands fair,” he wrote privately to his brother. He hoped it would be remembered also that none of what happened had come easily or predictably.

In Greene and Knox, Washington had found the best men possible, men of ability and energy who, like Washington, would never lose sight of what the war was about, no matter what was to come.

“The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth,” Paine had written. “Everything that is right or reasonable pleads for separation.”

The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. ~General George Washington July 2, 1776

New York was not at all like Boston, geographically, strategically, and in other ways. At Boston, Washington had known exactly where the enemy was, and who they were, and what was needed to contain them. At Boston the British had been largely at his mercy, and especially once winter set in. Here, with their overwhelming naval might and absolute control of the waters, they could strike at will and from almost any direction. The time and place of battle would be entirely their choice, and this was the worry overriding all others.

From Brooklyn Heights one looked down on all of New York City, the harbor, the rivers, and the long, low hills of New Jersey beyond. It was one of the grandest panoramas to be seen on the entire Atlantic seaboard.

Knox longed ardently for a separation from Britain, and the sooner the better. The future happiness or misery of a great proportion of the human race is at stake—and if we make a wrong choice, ourselves and our posterity must be wretched.

By renouncing their allegiance to the King, the delegates at Philadelphia had committed treason and embarked on a course from which there could be no turning back.

“We are in the very midst of a revolution,” wrote John Adams, “the most complete, unexpected and remarkable of any in the history of nations.”

A letter addressed to a person in a position of public responsibility ought to indicate that station, Washington said, otherwise it would appear mere private correspondence. He would not accept such a letter.

It was not enough that a leader look the part; by Washington’s rules, he must know how to act it with self-command and precision. John Adams would later describe Washington approvingly as one of the great actors of the age.

As British officers happily reminded one another, it was the largest fleet ever seen in American waters. In fact, it was the largest expeditionary force of the eighteenth century, the largest, most powerful force ever sent forth from Britain or any nation.

To many of the English, such affluence as they saw on Long Island was proof that America had indeed grown rich at the expense of Great Britain. In fact, the Americans of 1776 enjoyed a higher standard of living than any people in the world. Their material wealth was considerably less than it would become in time, still it was a great deal more than others had elsewhere. How people with so much, living on their own land, would ever choose to rebel against the ruler God had put over them and thereby bring down such devastation upon themselves was for the invaders incomprehensible.

Arriving at Brooklyn, Washington was outraged by what he saw, and in a letter written later in the day, he lectured Old Put as he might the greenest lieutenant. All “irregularities” must cease at once. “The distinction between a well regulated army and a mob is the good order and discipline of the first, and the licentious and disorderly behavior of the latter.” Seeing things as they were, not as he would wish they were, was known to be one of Washington’s salient strengths, and having witnessed firsthand the “loose, disorderly, and unsoldierlike” state of things among the troops at Brooklyn, and knowing how outnumbered they were by the enemy, he might have ordered an immediate withdrawal back to New York while there was still time. But he did not, nor is there any evidence that such a move was even considered.

That the rank-and-file British regular was far better trained, better disciplined, better equipped, and more regularly paid than his American counterpart was beyond question, as the commanders on both sides well appreciated. Further, the redcoats were in far better health over all.

For as long as the average soldier in Howe’s ranks had been in service, it had been longer still, more than ten years, since Britain had last waged war. For most of the redcoats, soldiers and young officers, like nearly all of the Americans, the battle to come was to be their first.

Captain John Jewett, who had been bayoneted twice, in the chest and stomach, and was in excruciating pain. “I sat with him most of the night, and slept but very little,” Fitch wrote. “The capt[ain] . . . was sensible of his being near his end, often repeating that it was hard work to die.”

Accounts of British, Scottish, and Hessian soldiers bayoneting Americans after they had surrendered were to become commonplace.

With the situation as grim as it could be, no one was more conspicuous in his calm presence of mind than Washington, making his rounds on horseback in the rain. They must be “cool but determined,” he had told the men before the battle, when spirits were high. Now, in the face of catastrophe, he was demonstrating what he meant by his own example. Whatever anger or torment or despair he felt, he kept to himself.

Incredibly, yet again, circumstances—fate, luck, Providence, the hand of God, as would be said so often—intervened.